Outdoor grills are extremely popular. They are commonly found on wheels on the back porches and balconies of homes and apartments, as permanent installations on patios and in back yards, and alongside the picnic tables at camp sites in many parks and other outdoor recreational areas.
Cleaning the Grilling Surface.
The most common grilling surface for home owner use is a rod or wire grate positioned over charcoal briquettes, i.e. a series of spaced-apart, parallel, cylindrical cross-section rods on which the food to be grilled is placed. The rods are typically about 5/32″ in diameter with a spacing of about ½″. It is more common for the rods for gas or electric grills to non-circular or flattened, typically about ⅜″ wide with W spacing. Plates of slit and expanded metal with their pattern of diamond-shaped openings are more common for large or commercial grills.
All grilling surfaces have to support the food being cooked above the heat source while at the same time permitting access of heat and flavor enhancing smoke to the food. The result of the grilling process is generally the accumulation on the grilling surface of charred bits of food, sauces and carbon from the heat source (“debris”) which has to be removed before the grill can again be used.
A great many devices have been used to clear this debris, many of them brushes containing metallic bristles. Examples of such known devices are disclosed in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,916,382 to Alderidge; U.S. Pat. No. 7,039,983 to Outlaw; Publication US 2005/0086755 to Dulles; and Publication No. US2005/90160544 to Geller. There is a risk of serious injury from individual bristles which on occasion become lodged in the debris during the brushing process, are transferred to the food being grilled, and are consumed.
Other known devices employ scrubbing pads or soft brushes of various materials. Examples of such devices are disclosed in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,276,023 to Grundy; Publication No. US 2013/0061411 to Witzel et al.; Publication No. US 2012/0060864 to Nowakowski, and Publication No. US 2006/0207042 to Rolston. While such devices avoid the health risk of wire bristles, and while they are generally effective in superficially cleaning a grilling surface, they are often ineffective in removing debris because the lack of rigidity of the brush bristles pad material prevents the application of sufficient mechanical force to clean the grilling surface.
Still other known devices are made of rigid metal and are configured to conform to the rod surface to mechanically scrape debris from one, sometimes two, rods at a time. Examples of such scrapers are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,668,302 to Kolodziej; U.S. Pat. No. 4,214,342 to Amundsen; and Publication No. US 2013/0104331 to Leis. Where the grilling surface is a sheet of expanded metal, such devices are ineffective because they do not conform to the spaced diamond-shaped openings. Where the grilling surface is parallel wire rods, the scraping of one rod at a time is time consuming and, while effective in dislodging debris from the upper surface of the rods, the cleaning of the rods may be unsatisfactory because of the debris accumulated on the sides and even underneath the rods in the grilling process.
All of the foregoing devices are multiple use devices, and are retained for subsequent uses, often without cleaning. The accumulation of fungus or bacteria on such devices creates a health risk. In addition, the eventual disposal of such metallic or plastic devices in landfills is problematical.
Flavoring by Smoking.
It is also common when grilling to add a flavor to the food being grilled by placing wood chips on the heat source, which chips have been water soaked to provide the flavor enhancing smoke over a longer combustion period rather than flaming which reduces the combustion period, provides less smoke and may be detrimental to the grilling process. Woods such as hickory, mesquite and alder, and the fruit woods such as apple or cherry, provide smoke which adds a unique flavor to the food grilled. None of the foregoing known grill surface cleaning devices have any utility in providing a flavor enhancing smoke during the grilling process.
One known device, disclosed in US Publication No. US 2011/0258801 to Thompson et al., comprises a rigid wooden paddle for mechanically scraping a grilling surface of spaced rods, where the scraping surface is conformed to the spaced rods by repeated use over heated rods, i.e., the rods burn a conforming indentation into the scraping surface through repeated use of the device. The species of wood is said to be selected to apply a “seasoning” to the rods which “seasoning” is said to transferred to the food placed on the rods for grilling. No data is provided and the efficacy of seasoning food in this manner is highly doubtful. Because the wooden paddle is retained for many uses, it suffers from many of the deficiencies described above.